A Darker Magic
by A.Sharper.Thorne
Summary: Alternate-timeline AU: Regina's curse did not end up sending everyone to a magic-less realm, and the Charmings ultimately defeated and imprisoned her. Years later, their lost daughter Emma returns to the Enchanted Forest with her son Henry - but her motives go beyond a simple family visit, and the secret she keeps might soon put her and Henry at odds with everyone around them.


**First OUAT fanfic! I should really be writing the things that I actually get paid for, but I couldn't hold in the feels anymore. I'm a total newcomer to this fandom, so please be gentle while I learn the ropes :)**

 **Background: This story is an alternate-timeline AU, in which Regina's curse didn't send everyone to Storybrooke, but led instead to a few years of post-curse war in the Enchanted Forest. Eventually the Charmings managed to defeat Regina, but they couldn't get back Emma, who grew up in the 'real' world in more or less the same way as canon. She and Henry eventually traveled to the Enchanted Forest and found out the truth of her origins, but Emma decided to go back to New York - until the time this story picks up, about a year later, when she's returned with Henry to the Enchanted Forest, for mysterious reasons.  
**

 **Characters: Expect to see a lot of Emma, Regina, and Henry, the Charmings, and probably an assortment of regular characters. I'm not entirely sold on which way non-canon romantic pairings will go, if any occur, but the central plot will revolve around Emma, Henry and Regina figuring out who they are and what they want.**

 **A Darker Magic**

"Come on, kid. We're gonna be late for... court."

Emma's eleven-year-old son wrinkled his nose. "Can't I just hang out with the dwarves while you're in court?" he begged. "Or - or maybe go for a walk on the grounds!" His volume rose with his excitement. "I think I saw an actual, real gnome in the garden the other day!"

Henry's enthusiasm made her smile, but she shook her head. "Sorry, no can do," she said. "I don't want you getting lost."

" _Mom_ ," he protested, "we've been here like, a month. I can find my way around." He grinned, "Wanna see?"

With a long-practiced move, Emma grabbed the back of his jacket before he could shoot off. "Not so fast. And we've been here just over two weeks," she corrected. "Let's give it a little more time to get used to the... surroundings..." She glanced around the corridor. "It's not exactly downtown Manhattan out there."

 _That_ was an understatement. For most of the past ten years - or nearly the past thirty, in her case - she and Henry had been surrounded by sky scrapers and traffic jams, by clicking heels and honks and ringtones. Here, she looked outside the window and saw the Enchanted Forest. _Literally_ enchanted - if she squinted, she swore she could see a fluttering glimmer in the distance that could only be a fairy.

Nope, certainly not Manhattan.

Emma wasn't sure she loved it here as much as she was supposed to.

But, she was here because she _needed_ to be here. There was nowhere else to go to find what she was looking for, and there was no way that she was going to give up. She gave Henry a worried look that she hoped he didn't see, and nudged him along toward the throne room.

They covered the last stretch of the corridor at a brisk pace. Emma's mental map was still a little blurry when it came to navigating the castle: she couldn't get used to the fact that the ceiling was twenty feet above their heads, and the flickering torches and weird echoes didn't help much, either. But she'd memorized a couple of routes, and relied on her inner compass for the rest, and so far they'd managed just fine.

She sighed as the back door into the throne room finally came into sight, and she nudged Henry again. "Come on, we're gonna be the last ones there."

A solitary guard stood to one side, and he bowed slightly when they approached. "Your highness."

Not _that_ again.

"Just Emma is fine, really..." she muttered under her breath. Pointlessly, she knew. That was another thing about the Enchanted Forest. Everyone either thought she was freaking Superman, or at the very least they treated her like royalty. They'd done that the first time around, two years before. Now that she and Henry had come back, the whispers followed again. The lost princess. The Savior.

She'd kind of wrapped her head around some of the stuff, mostly... but she still wasn't really into this predestined heroism business.

Let alone the princess dresses.

But her protest went unheeded yet again. The guard gave her a 'yes, your highness' and smiled cheerfully as he prepared to open the door. Emma tried to not resent him for being so... peppy. After all, this _was_ a fairytale land.

She steered Henry in front of her through the door, trying to get a glimpse of the throne room (did they really call it that?) and make sure they weren't too late.

Henry resisted her prodding long enough to turn around and grin at the doorman. "Thanks!"

The kid was more polite than she was.

Chastised, Emma glanced back over her shoulder. "Yeah - uh, thanks."

The guard just bowed his head and said 'your highness' again.

Emma sighed.

Eyes on the prize, she reminded herself. Putting up with armor-clad guards calling her royal titles was the least of her worries.

* * *

The Charmings greeted her and Henry with their usual enthusiasm, and the way that their faces lit up still made Emma a little uncomfortable.

"You made it!" Queen Snow White - or just plain Snow, as Emma had finally learned to call her - rushed down from the dais to meet them. "We thought maybe you'd gotten bored of the court proceedings..."

They _were_ bored, Henry in particular, but Emma wasn't overlooking any opportunity to learn about the Enchanted Forest and its magic. (And anyway she wasn't _quite_ so impolite as to tell their hosts that the most of the court sessions were just a little more boring than watching repeats on the weather channel.) "No, we just got a little lost," she said with an apologetic chuckle. "Still getting used to all those turns and passages..."

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather live in the royal wing...?" Snow was looking somewhere between worried and hopeful. "There's a set of chambers right next to ours that would be great for you and Henry, and I'm sure..."

"Uh - no, thanks. I mean... I think we're good in the...regular wing. The lower wing," she remembered. "It's quiet. And Henry likes being close to the forest." And their room was far enough out of the way that there wouldn't be...problems.

Snow sighed, the disappointed look in her eyes making Emma feel like she'd just kicked a puppy. "Well...I can see why he likes it," Snow conceded, and she turned to smile at Henry: "I'd love to take you on some of the trails around the forest. I used to spend a lot of time there, myself...!"

He grinned, "I know. When you were a bandit. I've read all about it."

Emma rolled her eyes. That book of his.

Sometimes she thought that damned book was what had started all of this. Most times these days, though, she knew better. This - everything that was happening with her, with Henry, the insanity and the stories and the magic - all of it had been her lot in life from the start. She just hadn't _known_ about it until her nine-year-old son had dumped the dusty, oversized storybook in her lap and informed her that her parents were Snow White and Prince Charming.

Sometimes she missed the days when she'd thought he was just being overly imaginative.

She tuned back into the conversation just in time to hear Henry asking, "Do you think you could show me the troll bridge?"

Great.

"Well - there aren't any trolls there anymore," said Charming, "but..."

"I know! You tricked them! That was really clever, by the way." Henry was back to hero worship.

The king laughed. "We can take a tour."

Emma cleared her throat. "Are we _sure_ there aren't any more trolls?" Overprotective mother wasn't her tune, usually. But when it came to Henry these days, she had to be...careful. An encounter with trolls might just trigger an incident, and they weren't ready for incidents.

"Oh, no, there haven't been any trolls spotted in years," Snow assured her. "The forest around the palace is very safe, I promise." She smiled, growing more excited again: "We can all go take a tour! You've only seen the grounds, but there's a lot more around here worth visiting... maybe we can get the dwarves to give us a tour of the mines - oh, and the wishing well, and the magical lake..."

Henry's eyes widened, if possible, even further: "There's a magical lake?"

"With talking fish!" said Charming.

"Wow!" Henry turned a pleading look on Emma. "Can we go, Mom? _Please_?"

"Er..." Faced with three disturbingly similar beseeching looks, she could do nothing but give in. "Sure... I guess we _are_ here to visit," she admitted, "might be nice to have an expedition..."

Snow clasped her hands together enthusiastically, "Oh, I'm sure you'll love it! The Enchanted Forest is a beautiful place..." She squeezed Emma's arm and smiled brightly. It was hard to be _too_ wary of her when she was just so genuinely joyful.

...Hard, but somehow Emma could manage it.

Sometimes she thought she wasn't a very nice person.

"We can go after court is over," suggested Charming, and, met with the hearty approval of both his wife and Henry, the plan was quickly agreed on. Just in time - the chamberlain looked ready to start letting people in for their audiences, and the four of them had to move back toward the center of the room.

* * *

Emma still couldn't really believe that she was sitting in a throne room, about to watch Snow White and Prince Charming hold court. It was... well, crazy. Two years before, when Henry had started talking about his fairytale fantasies, she'd laughed. Her son really could go on for hours, she knew, about things that happened entirely in his head...

Then a magical hat had swallowed them up and spit them back out in the middle of a forest and a fairy tale land at war, and Emma had been forced to admit that maybe it wasn't just Henry's imagination.

If she was honest about it, it hadn't been exactly a pleasant surprise.

It wasn't that she wasn't... _glad_ , she supposed, to finally find out the truth about where she'd come from. It was just that none of the scenarios that she'd ever imagined had involved fairytales coming to life, or dark wizards and fantastic beasts and a magical destiny to save anyone. She'd made a few half-hearted attempts to find her parents in the past, true, but she'd gotten used to the idea that there was no information to be found... until Henry dug out the answers from the children's section at the local library, and their life had been turned completely upside down.

Emma forced a smile and a half-wave as Snow gave her another of her bright-eyed smiles. The queen had certainly warmed up to her, that much was clear - but Emma saw very plainly that there was still a lot of hurt and disappointment there, and _that_ wasn't exactly pleasant, either. Not that it was the Charmings' fault, entirely...Emma supposed anyone would've been a little shocked, if the daughter they'd thought lost miraculously turned up, only to be a twenty-eight-year-old adult single mom instead of the angelic pre-teen they'd been imagining.

Suffices to say, as much as she hadn't expected the Charmings, the Charmings also hadn't expected _her_ \- and when the damned hat had first brought her to the Enchanted Forest, there'd been a few conversations that hadn't been handled too well by either party. But the whole dark wizard drama had ensued, and by the time Emma was done fighting the darkness and pulling swords out of stones (seriously) and all that jazz, she and the Charmings had come to a reasonable understanding. They were good people, she admitted that much. Even now, as she watched them meet and greet the folk that had come pouring into the courtroom, she could tell that they were good leaders, and loved. But...

...but she wasn't comfortable with them, not fully, and she certainly wouldn't have been comfortable leaving her real life to come and play princess in a realm that as far as she knew existed inside a hat. Especially if that realm had ogres and curses and corset fashion.

So she'd been glad, yes, to find out the truth (mostly glad), and grateful for the opportunity to get to know her... biological parents... but by the end of a couple of months all she'd wanted was to get herself and Henry back home to their little Upper East Side apartment, and take a breather. And to a great extent, she'd gotten her wish: after the dark wizard was out of the way, and despite the Charmings' pleas to the contrary, Emma had hopped that magical hat right back to Manhattan and to what she hoped would be a normal life again for her and her son. And a normal life it had been.

For a while.

Until Henry's incidents had started.

Then she'd known they needed help, and the kind of help they needed wasn't available in New York City.

Emma sighed, and absently rubbed Henry's shoulder as he sank into a comfortable sofa to one side of the throne dais. He'd been more interested in court proceedings the first couple of times, but a few dozen administrative and agricultural and zoning quibbles later, he'd realized that maybe royal politics were less interesting then he'd hoped. While Emma watched the audiences and put up with occasional introductions, he'd taken to curling up with a book, instead.

She eyed the leather-bound volume with scuffed edges. "Is that a new one?"

"An Illustrated History of the Enchanted Kingdom!" he said proudly. "David - I mean, King Charming - promised he was going to find it for me. Apparently kids here use it in school. And look - " (he opened the book and held it out for her to see, though she had to idea what she was looking at) "- it's got way more details than the Story Book! And it goes back further, too! Did you know the first kings actually arrived in the Enchanted Kingdom from a place called Avalon? Like in the King Arthur legends! Do you remember when we read those?"

Emma laughed. "I don't know, would you like to remind me?"

Henry opened his mouth excitedly, but stopped as he caught on to her teasing. He grinned back. "Mom, I think you remember. But I'll tell you any new things I find in here, anyway. Who knows? It might even helps with the - "

Emma shushed him instantly, looking over her shoulder to make sure no one had heard. "Remember what we talked about?" she whispered. The rule was, no mentioning _the incidents_ , unless they were alone and well out of earshot of anyone.

Everyone around here was extremely welcoming and tried to put them at ease, yes, but Emma didn't know how they'd react if they knew the real reason that had driven her back to the Enchanted Forest with Henry. And she didn't want to find out.

"Remember?" she asked again.

"Operation Phoenix," Henry nodded, with a face as serious as an eleven-year-old could manage. "I remember." He'd been so excited about the name. Emma didn't really get where he came up with it, but if it made him feel less anxious about the whole thing, it was great in her book.

She smiled at her son, and tried not to look too worried. They'd already been back in the Enchanted Forest for over two weeks, and she wasn't any closer to figuring out how to get what she needed. Friendly chats with the Charmings, listening in on court sessions, and the few library trips she'd managed to sneak below the radar, they weren't amounting to much progress. "Operation Phoenix" was in serious danger of stalling out, and Emma couldn't let that happen.

She ruffled Henry's hair one last time and moved away from his sofa, strolling toward Snow with a pleasant smile and a determined mantra in her head: she was going to get things moving, and she was going to find what she'd come here for.

* * *

 **All the random Camelot references are a coincidence. I started writing this months ago, and decided not to change those bits just because the new season went in that direction.**


End file.
